“We know we have the speed – that isn’t a concern,” said Maserati Formula E team principal James Rossiter after the recent Sao Paulo E-Prix, the fourth time in six 2023 weekends where neither of its drivers scored points.
“At this stage, we just need to execute a mistake-free race weekend, and if we can do that, I’m confident that we can be in the mix to score some good points, and maybe even a podium.”
In truth, those words could have been uttered after any of the six races this season, such has been the lamentable form of one of last year’s title-challenging teams. Let us not forget that apart from a pot of blue paint and some Trident decals this is essentially the same operation as the one that took Edoardo Mortara to four E-Prix victories and third in the 2022 title race.
There is, however, one very vital ingredient missing. Mercedes power.
Is it too tempting to suggest the team was flattered by the best powertrain package last season? Put plainly, it is looks very much like that was the case just now.
That is because from the first six races of this season the team has collected three points. To put that into perspective, in its previous Venturi guise it had 86 on the board at the same juncture last season – making for a loss of 96.512%.
Even in leaner times, such as in the 2018/19 season – when the team struggled with reliability issues, particularly amid recalcitrant wishbones – it had mustered 67 points. To have achieved just three thus far in 2023 is obviously very poor.
Rossiter, who joined the team from the multiple race- and title-winning DS Techeetah operation last autumn, knows it’s not good enough. For the first time in his fledgling managerial life, he is starting to face tough questions from all sides. He’s been around racing long enough to know that a good slice of the buck will stop with him and he’s not shied away from answering those questions so far.
So, what to do? Make a change, or stick it out?
That reads as a simple enough proposition on paper but the reality is that, through circumstances of a double homologation, reliance on DS hardware, and the disruption of Nyck de Vries leaving the team before he’d started last year, Rossiter and the team are a little limited.
It doesn’t make a massive amount of sense to make a driver change at this stage. Both Mortara and Guenther have made mistakes this season, and Mortara actually has been the more consistently reckless behind the wheel, having incidents in each weekend of racing so far. He is believed to have a contract until the summer of 2024.
Guenther, who has been in positions of strength in Hyderabad, Cape Town and, to a lesser extent, Sao Paulo, has not converted his promise.
In Hyderabad he was dreadfully unlucky to take his attack mode just as Sam Bird triggered his infamous hairpin clash; in Cape Town he and Maserati got rattled by overtaking polesitter Sacha Fenestraz under a full course yellow and then crashed; in Brazil he suffered a technical issue and then had contact with Sebastien Buemi, when trying to let the Envision driver through after failing to stop, after a systems-triggered braking episode.
So, these are messy times at Maserati. But again, the promise and potential of big results is absolutely there. It’s not as strong as it is at DS Penske and perhaps that shouldn’t be a huge surprise considering the strength in depth of that operation.
It probably isn’t all a surprise to Rossiter on one level at least. He was after all so embedded in black-and-gold before donning the Trident blue.
There is another driver too who straddles the Stellantis Motorsport mothership. He’s called Oliver Turvey, and perhaps he’s looking at the points table right now and thinking he’d have brought more points to the Maserati party this season.
Whether or not that is true will never be known, but the former NIO driver does have admirers at Maserati. It’s just he doesn’t have enough of them in high places seemingly.
One man who does is Alex Lynn, who The Race understands was scoped out and desired for the De Vries seat last September. Ultimately it didn’t work out as Lynn was fully immersed in Cadillac’s LMDh/Hypercar plans in endurance racing for 2023.
The feeling is that Lynn, who is loving life in the IMSA SportsCar Championship and the World Endurance Championship compared to the often fractious Formula E paddock, will return to Formula E sometime in the future. Not yet 30 years of age, he has the experience and technical aptitude to add to his single E-Prix success earned with Mahindra in London in July 2021.
The most important question on this topic though is whether Lynn really wants to right now. Spurned by Jaguar in 2019, then unfathomably squandered by Mahindra in 2021, his professional appetite just now is easily being satisfied much more by Cadillac on the world endurance stage than it ever was in Formula E.
For Maserati, it seems that its transition from Venturi to its present halfway house manufacturer guise is stuck in a weird kind of limbo. Despite what it often says publicly, it has precisely the same technical package as Stellantis stablemate DS Automobiles.
The DS E-TENSE FE23 is far from an easy car for its drivers to utilise and indeed engineers to crack. Stoffel Vandoorne in particular has found it difficult to fully master and he’s the reigning champion, so actually maybe it is too easy to be too hard on the Maserati drivers in this first difficult phase of the 2023 season.
While it is a matter of fact that the drivers have created their own problems, the car has not always been on their side either.
Guenther’s issue in Sao Paulo, for example, looked like something completely out of his control. While he and the team stayed quiet about it specifically, The Race understands that it was an issue with the powertrain that caused a complete lack of initial stopping power.
What that does to a driver’s confidence can only be speculated upon but, as they barrel into the braking area of a corner at over 160mph, it’s fair to say it cannot be good. While Guenther raced on to 11th place, confidence in the equipment under him cannot have been high.
This has happened to several drivers this season. Oliver Rowland, Bird, Kelvin van der Linde, Sebastien Buemi, Mitch Evans and most alarmingly Pascal Wehrlein in free practice in Hyderabad have suffered incidents and accidents where they were unable to stop their cars.
Yet the more prosaic question still remains about the Maserati team itself, and specifically its initial make-up and methods of working. Is it really fully integrated into the Stellantis Motorsport side of the business and, if not, when will it become so?
It will naturally take some time for the Monaco branch to gel and get organised but DS Penske, which remember is on paper a new entity too, has won a race, taken a pole and sits a steady fourth in the standings with 79 more points than its ‘customer’ team that races with the same equipment.
All these topics will be teasing Rossiter’s brain as he takes in one of his epic bike rides across the Col de Turini and into the lower Alps via his and his team’s hometown of Monaco. He’s continuing to discover the world of being a team principal and all of its burns.
But perhaps the pressure is actually more on Thomas Chevaucher as head of Stellantis Motorsport, because it is he who takes more responsibility in building and maintaining the bridges in that complex side of its world championship motorsport programme.
If those conduits are to be crossed then surely the blue half of the Stellantis mothership needs much more assimilation with the programme as a whole.
That is why Maserati should not make any snap judgements on Mortara and Guenther, two proven E-Prix winners. Berlin Templehof, a place where each have won in previous seasons, should be the perfect place for a currently blunt Trident to sharpen its act and finally start sticking it to its rivals and critics.
